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Abstract

This study explores how selected West African war novels employ non-realist narrative
modes to portray disruptions in the child’s development into adulthood. The novels considered are
Chris Abani’s Song for Night (2007), Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah is Not Obliged (2006),
Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2005) and Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen and
Me (2005). These novels strain at the conventions of realism as a consequence of the attempt to
represent the disruptions in child development as a result of the upheavals of war. A core
proposition of the study is to present why the authors in question are obliged to employ non-realist
modes in representing disrupted childhoods that reflect the social and cultural disorder attendant
upon war. The dissertation also asks pertinent questions regarding the ideological effect of these
narrative strategies and the effect of the particular stylistic idiosyncrasies of each of the authors in
figuring childhood in postcolonial Africa. The novels in question employ surrealism, the absurd,
the grotesque and magical realism, in presenting the first person narratives of children in war
situations, or the reflections of adult narrators on children affected by war. This study further
analyses the ways the aesthetic modes employed by these authors underscore, in particular,
children’s experiences of war. Through strategic use of specific literary techniques, these authors
highlight questions of vulnerability, powerlessness and violence on children, as a group that has
been victimised and co-opted into violence. The study further considers how these narrative
transformations in the representations of children in novels, capture transformations in ideas about
childhood in postcolonial Africa.